Reducing notification channel overload

As a relatively new user to Home Assistant I find the notification icon to be quite busy. Urgent issues are intermingled with optional or informational issues. For me this leads to a devaluing of the notification button as a useful information source, as I’ve come to distrust it’s presence as something that warrants my attention.

Has anyone else found a way to deal with this? Ideally I’d like is to have separate notification channels for urgent issues and another for less time-sensitive issues. Ideally with the user being able to configure where notifications get classified to.

I have some some initial forum and web searches hoping someone else has been working on this, but found nothing so far. Surely I can’t be the only one bothered by this, though.

What are you using them for? I’ve had mine setup for over a year and I am only now considering setting up notifications. You might be able to just delete a lot of them.

I use Telegram Bot (webhooks).

This allows me to send a notification to one of three groups:

Alerts urgent issues, errors, missing devices etc…

System logging non urgent system decisions and why they were made. e.g. irrigation turned on, automatic climate adjustments, automatic backup pass/fail, updates available, etc…

General garbage reminders, energy use, etc…

All of these message groups are set up to delete messages older than 1 month. As the system admin only I see the first two groups. Everyone gets the General group.

I also use the Compaion App critical alerts for smoke, water leak and security alarm triggers. This is because it can interrupt do not disturb mode. Telegram cant do this.

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I assume you’ve perused this info?

You can create separate notification channels and handle them differently on your device, as well as change the icon. I have a number of channels I use, but I mostly treat all of them the same (with a few exceptions such as a fire, break-in or water leak).

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I’m referring to the notifications which appear when using the Home Assistant front-end in the browser. Apologies for not making this clear.

Because a large portion of the notifications I get are low-urgency, I have been “trained” to mostly ignore the notification system at all. So I do delete a lot of them, but this has caused me to be “trained” by HA that their notifications are low-value.

I phrased my question poorly, as I was focused on the notification bell icon inside the Home Assistant web front-end.

However this solution does address the root motivation of my problem – being able to surface priority events in a notification channel that can be high-signal. Not exactly what I want, but in some ways better than what I wanted. Thanks

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